Financing and Deploying Clean Energy Certificate Program

The core courses of the CBEY Certificate in Financing and Deploying Clean Energy run sequentially, from August through May. They include Clean Energy Policy, Technology Transitions, Renewable Energy Project Finance, and Innovation.

A broad description of the curriculum is available below and week by week themes and learning objectives for the core courses are available for download.

Download core course themes and objectives

This course is led by Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy at the Yale Law School and the Yale School of the Environment and former Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Dan Esty. 

This course will teach you to think creatively about institutional design. Because energy is a highly regulated market, policy plays a large role in shaping the transition to a clean energy economy. At its best, effective policy promotes a sustainable energy future by encouraging innovation and leveling the playing field for all fuels to compete fairly. Poorly designed policy, even if well-intentioned, can have the opposite result. You will explore how policy is made and what makes it successful through examining the current regulatory framework, energy policy history, and case studies.

This course is led by Director of Energy Studies at Yale Michael Oristaglio.

The transition from the entrenched fossil fuel economy is fraught with obstacles that require deep systems knowledge to navigate. Moving along a pathway to a low carbon future means understanding which technologies are available, how they work, and what their limitations are. In this course, you will examine technological transitions, current and incoming energy technologies, the structure of the utility grid and how it will fare with integrating new technologies and increasing demand, as well as the socio-behavioral insights that influence buildings, transport, materials, and energy storage.

This course is led by Yale School of the Environment Lecturer and private equity investor Daniel Gross. 

This course will delve into the foundational principles of project finance from both the perspective of the renewable energy investor as well as the developer. In this course, you will take a closer look at the challenges inherent to financing renewable energy projects whose cashflows stem from the sale of intermittent power through power purchase agreements and learn to analyze risks, structure a transaction, read legal documentation derived from real projects, and build financial models. 

This course is led by Yale School of Management Lecturer and Chair of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority Board Richard Kauffman. 

In this course, you will examine what innovative models can be pursued to accelerate the clean energy transition and hear from a range of experts about innovation in the fields of policy, technology, and finance. Despite the meteoric rise of some renewable technologies like solar, financial markets have been relatively slow to react to the call for a clean economy transition. This cautious response is in part due to a lack of standardized commercial arrangements, insufficient performance data, misperceptions of risk, and lack of access to secondary capital markets, which together increase the cost of capital.